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Serbia owed justice in Kosovo
By GREGORY CLARK
No commentator likes to sound like a conspiracy nut. But if that is the fate of
anyone who tries to challenge the distortions involved in painting Serbia as
criminally guilty over Kosovo and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, then so
be it.
Let's go back to the beginning. When Nazi Germany tried to occupy Yugoslavia
during World War II, the Croat and Muslim minorities there backed the Nazis in
their campaign against the mainly Serbian resistance. Even the Nazis are said
to have been impressed by the brutality with which the Croatian forces the
dreaded Ustashi set out to massacre and cleanse whole villages and even towns
of their Serbian populations. Some 1 million Serbs died as a result, many of
them in the Croatian death camp at Jasenovac, said to rival some Nazi Holocaust
operations in scale and atrocity.
With the war over, Serb revenge seemed inevitable. But the Yugoslav resistance
leader, Tito, managed to restrain passions by allowing Serbian domination of
the central government while dividing the nation into semi-autonomous regions
with mixed ethnic populations. But it was an uneasy compromise, as I saw on the
ground in the former Yugoslavia of the '60s and as even we in distant Australia
probably realized better than most.
There we saw frequent attacks by recalcitrant Ustashi elements on Yugoslav
diplomatic missions and the large Serbian immigrant community. We took it for
granted that in any breakup of post-communist Yugoslavia it would be insanity
to ask the large Serbian minorities in Croatia and Bosnia to accept rule by
their former pro-Nazi Croatian and Muslim oppressors. But insanity prevailed,
thanks largely to pressure from Germany, Britain and the United States, all
seeking to expand influence into yet another Eastern Europe ex-communist nation.
In short, the subsequent fighting was inevitable, as were the atrocities, by
all sides. But the Serbs could at least claim they were seeking mainly to
recover some of the towns and villages they had lost under the Nazis. Much is
made of Serbian revenge killings in the Bosnian district of Srebrenica in 1995.
But we see no mention of the wartime and postwar killings of Serbs in that
area, which had reduced the Serbian population from a prewar level of over half
to less than one third. Nor do we find much mention of the atrocities involved
in expelling hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Croatia.
Enter the Kosovo problem.
To assist the Muslim side during the 1992-1995 Bosnian fighting, British and
U.S. intelligence organs resorted to the extraordinary recruitment and training
of Islamic extremists from Afghanistan's anti-Soviet wars of the 1980s. Help
and training was also given to Albanian Muslim extremists setting up their
Kosovo Liberation Army to launch guerrilla attacks against isolated Serbian
communities. (These long-suspected facts were confirmed by Britain's former
environment minister Michael Meacher writing in The Guardian newspaper
recently).
Even more extraordinary was the way Serbian attempts to prevent or retaliate
against those KLA attacks were denounced as the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo's
Albanians (ironically it was the KLA that invented the term, to describe its
plan to drive out the Serbian minority). The U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization move to bomb Serbia into submission followed soon after, even
though it was the KLA, not Belgrade, that violated a 1998 ceasefire organized
by the U.S.
The propaganda war used to justify Western policies over Kosovo was
unrelenting. We were told that 500,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed there
by the Serbs (miraculously we are now given a figure of around 10,000). Much
was made of a 1989 speech by former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic said to
call for "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo. But one has only to read the speech to
realize it said the exact opposite that it was a call for moderation in
handling ethnic Albanian hostility to a justifiably stronger Serbian political
presence there; the idea that the 10 percent Serbian minority there would set
out deliberately to expel the large ethnic Albanian majority was patently
absurd from the start. Yet that absurdity has regularly been trundled out by
allegedly objective Western commentators relying heavily on the 1999 flight of
ethnic Albanians to neighboring Macedonia as proof. But that flight was
temporary, and came after the U.S./NATO bombing attacks, not before. Some
of it was also staged.
Almost nowhere do we see any mention of the hundreds of thousands of Serbs,
Jews, Gypsies and moderate ethnic Albanians since expelled permanently from
Kosovo by the now dominant extremists. Meanwhile we are supposed to be annoyed
by Belgrade's and Moscow's resistance to a Kosovo independence that would
almost certainly see the remaining ethnic minorities even further victimized.
The implications for the future are frightening. The propaganda victory over
Kosovo seems to have convinced our Western policymakers that they can say
anything they like on any issue and rely on spin, black information and a lazy
or compliant media to get away with it.
The 1999 ultimatum given Belgrade over Kosovo was pure blackmail: Either you
agree to our demands, no matter how unreasonable (including the demand to put
not only Kosovo but also Serbia under NATO military occupation), or we use our
dominant air power to wreck your economic and social infrastructure. The
subsequent destruction of Serbia's industries, including its only car factory,
was pure vandalism.
Even Belgrade's willingness to accept a Kosovo under the control of moderate
ethnic Albanians was rejected, in favor of the KLA Muslim extremists the U.S.
had long supported. Ironically some of those extremists have now joined
al-Qaida's anti-U.S. jihad.
On the 50th anniversary of their original unification, the EU powers
congratulated themselves on the way they had kept Europe free of war ever since
1945. They did not seem even to notice how they had just gone to war with a
European nation called Serbia. Serbia was the one European nation to resist
Nazi German domination (the others either surrendered or collaborated). Its
capital, Belgrade, was viciously bombed as a result. The next time it was
bombed was by a NATO that included Germany and many of the other former
collaborator nations, this time to force it to submit over Kosovo. Little
wonder the Serbs remain angry.
Gregory Clark is a former Australian government official and currently vice
president of Akita International University. A translation of this article will
appear at www.gregoryclark.net
The Japan Times: Monday, July 2, 2007
(C) All rights reserved
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